


Night diving

by Trash



Category: Linkin Park
Genre: Drug Abuse, M/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-20
Updated: 2014-01-20
Packaged: 2018-01-09 10:25:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 871
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1144857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trash/pseuds/Trash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another album, another tour, another party, another group of strippers dancing on the stage, another gurney being wheeled into the bathroom</p>
            </blockquote>





	Night diving

Another album, another tour, another party, another group of strippers dancing on the stage, another gurney being wheeled into the bathroom.

Another night of drugs, drugs, drugs for a certain lead singer of a certain band. And Mike has to climb over the paramedics to get into the bathroom where Chester is lying in the corner, shirtless and unconscious.

“He’ll be fine,” he assures the medics who stare at him dubiously, “He’s fine. Close the fucking door.”

He slaps Chester’s face hard, rousing him. The singer opens his eyes and stares up at Mike blearily, confused. Then he starts to struggle. Fists fly, none meeting anything other than air. Mike pulls Chester to his feet and fights to get him out of the room, out of the club.

The cool air hits Chester like a brick wall. He read somewhere or heard it in a song, or maybe wrote it himself but he can’t tell because the drugs make everything seem like a far away dream. He read, heard, wrote that the worst thing to hit somebody with is a wall. And he laughs hysterically as Mike drags him into the alley behind the club.

“Would you calm the fuck down?” Mike hisses, slamming Chester against the wall.

A wall of silence, a wall of anger, a wall of words like ‘if you don’t get sober you’ll never see your kids again’. Divorce, sole custody, those are walls like no other.

“What’d you take this time?”

Chester has no idea. Heroin, he thinks. He vaguely remembers mixing the powder with water in a bottle cap and cooking it, then grabbing the syringe from where it was lying next to the toilet. Shooting up is the best feeling in the world until you go too far and you can’t feel your arms and your legs are kicking madly but it isn’t your brain telling them to move.

Shooting up is great. Until you come down. Runners, when they’ve used up all of their energy in a race, they call it hitting the wall. Junkies could call it the same thing.

“Mike,” Chester cries, clawing at his arms, a spider’s web mess of collapsed veins and dried blood, “Mike,” he whines, writhing against the wall. Crawling out of his skin. “Mikey I can’t stay here. We have to keep moving.”

“No, Chester, we can’t keep moving. We’ve nowhere to go, now. We can’t go back inside. We can’t go back to the hotel. There’s press everywhere just waiting to see you strung out again.”

He’s sobbing, now, “Fuck the press,” he hisses, “Fuck them all. God, Mike, my fucking skin is on fire. I’m burning.”

“You’re not burning.”

He reaches up to cup Mike’s face, stroking his cheek with his thumb slowly. He watches Mike’s eyes flicker closed slowly. In his head things are fine, the way they used to be, and they’re both happy.

Unfaithful, gay. As if he wasn’t already going to hell. But Sam’s touch was nothing like Mike’s and he gave in. He brought this all on himself. The drugs were just another addition to his list of bad choices.

One moment of complete clarity. The clouds the drugs cast over his mind parting for a second “I love you,” he says.

Mike pulls away and shakes his head sadly, “If you loved me you’d stop killing yourself like this.”

There’s nothing he can say to that. Since this all started he’s been called selfish in a thousand different ways. Why doesn’t anybody understand that this isn’t about anybody else; it’s just himself that he wants to hurt. It’s the demons in his head he wants to kill.

So he walks away, wordlessly. Mike calls after him but he can’t hear anything but ringing in his ears that gets louder the further he gets from the club. He’s dying for another hit but he just keeps walking, tears smudging the makeup he applied so carefully in the hotel bathroom.

He has no idea where they are and doesn’t care, the novelty of touring having fully worn off now, but follows signs to the beach. It’s pitch black and he can’t see the sand but he climbs over the barrier anyway and jumps down into the darkness.

As he walks toward the sound of the ocean he sings happy birthday to himself. The party was for him. But so were the drugs a roadie handed him in a brown paper bag with a big smile saying “Happy Birthday.”

The water is freezing cold and chills him to the bone but he keeps going, walking against the waves.

“Happy birthday to me,” he sings, startled as a sob chokes him. He suddenly feels so pathetic. Drugged up, waist deep in polluted water, crying his fucking eyes out.

But he keeps going.

Mike used to tell him stories about going night diving. “It’s amazing,” he’d say, “There’s just you and the water. We should go. It’d be real romantic.”

Chester never told Mike that he can’t swim.

That his biggest fear was drowning.

But here and now he keeps walking until water fills his lungs.

And that morning as the sun rises, light is shed upon a greying body on the shore.


End file.
